In Twilight Regalia

This weekend John Lennon would have been sixy-five, had he not been shot and killed in 1980. I saw a cartoon drawing by an artist in a fan mag once — what would the Beatles all look like at age 64? it fathomed, and it had shown a proposed aging of each of the Beatles, all grey haired or pouchy. When John was killed I thought (after all the grief was gone), Now I’ll never get to see if he came out like the cartoon…

I get to thinking about the sheer magnitude of his impact on the world and I realize how confusing it would seem to explain his importance to someone from, say, another planet.

Was he born remarkable in some way, they would ask? Royalty? No. He was just an average kid who goofed off and got in trouble, just a normal person.

Then he must have been an exceptional musician; they might say. Yes, in someways yes — but many other musicians have had much more effect on history, and his isn’t tested quite yet. He’s not been gone long enough to know. His musicianship was far less than those that stuck from the past. To serious musicians, his work might seem facile over the long stretch.

Then he must have been a great leader, like that Ghandi fellow? Well, he never really planned on it. He wanted to change things, it’s true, but he’d not trained for it. His wit and street-smart ways were more of a boy jabbing at a teacher on occasion. He spent as much time laughing at the world and being frustrated at it as he did actually changing it. Sometimes the working class hero just got stoned. If there had been a choice, he might just have wanted to live quietly with his wife and child.

Perhaps he was a great thinker of yours? Well. He liked to write, and he liked to speak. But he’d never formed a coherent theory of some grand philosophy. He argued a lot, but he’d never debated in any formal way. He didn’t claim to be a genius, ever. He just wrote songs, and some poems and small writings.

Then he was perhaps most important because you all think You are like him, says the alien. (Those aliens are catching on fast– maybe they are dangerous?. Hmm) There they might have us. That we did. That school kid who played pranks and rebelled and grew his hair too long and stuck his tongue out at the governments and their wars. He told them all off with what we would have said, in our voice, with a great sense of righteous indignation. And he put it where we could sing it, so easily. So memorably.

Perhaps it was just his contradictions that made his impression on us so strong? His joy toward life was tinged with bitterness about the way the world was actually going, to the point where he would seem to withdraw from us for periods of time. His impish jabbing at those in power, whether it was government or just the recording company, was hilarious. It urged the simplest of love at the most lawless and radical time in history. And on the human front, he had appeared to be a man who chose love above all things, particularly his love for his wife above all. That seemed both complex and noble to us. Actually when you come right down to it, his whole intended point on all fronts, was always love.

It’s rather hard NOT to like someone who truly believes in love.

I had a firsthand look at his love one day, a few years after he had left us.

I was wordprocessing that day in a Silicon Valley law firm, being “the human scanner” as I called myself in the days before optical character readers and .pdfs and other such wonders. I was working on some nasty prospectus, when my attorney popped his head in the door. It was late, I was already late going home, and so burnt out. The office was empty but for us. He had stayed late for a meeting with a client.

But there the head came round the door again (It usually bode ill for me when he popped his head in at that late a time) and he said in an excited voice:

“Pssssst! You want to see something really cool?” He’d never said THAT before.

Curious, I said sure. He beckoned me into our conference room with the giant walnut table. On it was a large black portfolio, the old kind that art students used to carry around, made of pressed-paperboard, trying hard to look like leather. He went over to the table, and opened the portfolio.

Some plain manilla sheets were underneath. “You have to be extremely careful, touch just the edges, he said. “It’s John Lennon’s drawings.”

My jaw fell to the floor. “You’re KIDDING ME!!.” I was in the presence of the greatest possible fame of my whole life???

“NO!!!”, he said gleefully. “This guy just asked me to hold them as collateral on that deal we’re working on. They’re called ‘Bag One.’ ”

So solemnly, in silence and an occasional whisper, the two of us gingerly lifted page after page, and took a look at the inside of John’s head, on a day when he was just doodling, having a good time. There were sketches of things around him. There were doodles that looked like they characatured people or things around him. There were just plain doodles, that looked like they belonged on high school notebooks. Some were very small in corners, (wondered if he’d been on the phone at the time?) while others were large and ugly and dashed off in a hurry. Pictures of himself in a cap, or with beard. But the one subject we saw over and over and over again was Yoko.

Picture after picture of Yoko. Yoko looking blithe and goddess. Yoko the Japanese Spirit Figure. Yoko looking sideways. Yoko the sex symbol with rosey breasts. Yoko the pretty face. Yoko the almost Simian - ok that one wasn’t very good perhaps — and the one I shall always remember:

The best of them and most telling was a drawing that used almost the whole page. It was the two of them in bed together, with a tiny, huddled John laid down on the left, almost hiding or cowering, being surrounded and sheltered by an enORmous flowing-haired Yoko supergoddess on the right, or rather, almost the whole page. It was Yoko as Protectoress of John the Meek, the humble, the almost worthless, by comparison. Yoko as icon. Yoko as holy.

I felt a pain when I saw it. It spoke volumes about the man. Yes, this was one who believed in love.

When people talk nowadays about Yoko’s distorted view of John, and how she meddles in his legacy, making his life whitewashed, I always think of that drawing. I know why she does what she does. Anyone who saw that drawing would know, they had something everyone in the world dreams of, or perhaps much more than most can dream.

I think that’s why John was so famous, I tell my alien guest. Perhaps most people just can’t dream of that kind of love. Perhaps they go their ways daily and love in a way that’s conscious and functional and packaged into certain quality times. They have wives and kids and cars and dogs and cell phones and their world goes on, in dinnertimes and alarm clocks and freeways.

Then might hear his song on their radio, though, and pause in their little lives, and hear LOVE.

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